2/28/2010 @ 6:00PM

Nine Young Chinese Entrepreneurs To Watch

By 2015 there will be 500 million people under age 30 in China–roughly the population of the entire European Union. And they aren’t idolizing Lei Feng, a devoted follower of Mao. They are looking to figures such as Bill Gates and Michael Dell, says Ge Dingkun, a professor of entrepreneurship at China Europe International Business School in Shanghai.

Young people, barely a generation removed from Chairman Mao’s strict communism, are embracing entrepreneurship. The incomes of twenty-somethings in China grew 34% in the past three years, the largest growth of any age group, according to a survey by
Credit Suisse
. While large industries in China–such as banking, steel, telecommunications and electricity generation–are still essentially state-owned, a growing chunk of new wealth being created comes from the hard work and vision of scrappy upstarts.

These wunderkinds are attacking the gamut of industries and opportunities–including bringing
Disney
movies to the mainland, increasing efficiency in health care delivery and developing the next wave of online games and Web applications.

Stacy Palestrant, a senior associate at Katzenbach Partners who conducted a study of Chinese MBA students, calls them the bridge generation. “They grew up in communist China and in the 1980s, the country started to change,” she says. “So they have a foot in both worlds.”

Here are but a few of them. For a gander at all nine, check out our slideshow.

Robin Chan, 32, founder of XPD Media

XPD is the leading international social-gaming publisher in China. Chan’s discovery: While dozens of Chinese game developers want access to global social networks, they have few feasible distribution methods. “The culture gap and operational limits are huge barriers for success in this industry,” says Chan. Based in Beijing, XPD helps unlock the multibillion-dollar global social-gaming market. It recently published a game called Medical Mayhem that in less than two months nabbed more than 2 million users and 100,000 Facebook fans.

Zafka Zhang, 30, founder of China Youthology

Zhang’s market-research company helps the likes of General Motors,
Nokia
, Pepsico,
Nestle
,
Wrigley
and McCann Erickson tap into China’s youth culture. Youthology has been profitable since 2008 (five months after the company started) and is now gearing up to launch its own social-networking platform to track opinions and trends of young people throughout China.

Jian Shuo Wang, 33, founder of Kijiji

Wang is a start-up addict. In college, Wang founded Hotales.net, an online marketing site. After six years at
Microsoft
he struck out on his own. In 2005 he launched Kijiji,
eBay’s
classified-advertising business in China, now with listings in more than 300 cities. Three years later Wang spun off Baixing.com, an online community with listings for houses, jobs and second-hand goods.

Si Shen, 28, founder of PapayaMobile

PapayaMobile turns mobile phones into social networks. Its software lets users play games, share pictures and send instant messages with those who have the PapayaMobile application. Papaya has 3 million registered users across multiple hardware platforms–iPhone, Android and Java. Shen earned her stripes in the mobile-product-development unit of
Google
Beijing. She has degrees in computer science and engineering from Stanford.